Andrew C. McCarthy: The Libyan People are No More Our Ally than Qaddafi
[Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.]
...Yes, yes, I know: We are not supposed to look at Libyans now as they appeared the last time we took notice: a cheering throng greeting Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie terrorist, whom the Obama administration was cajoled into ignoring when the Brits orchestrated his release from jail to appease our spot-shorn leopard. Nor are we supposed to register that Qaddafi’s main opponents in this 97 percent Muslim country are Islamists who have about as much use for us as they do for Colonel Crazy. No, this is to be the desperately wished-for Arab awakening, so we are to take the Libyans as noble secularists who just want to throw off the yoke of tyranny and establish democracy (and never you mind the sharia).
Eager to get with the program, newspapers, blogs, and television reports tell us that Qaddafi has been America’s incorrigible enemy for 30 years. The problem is, if your memory actually goes back more than ten minutes, you may recall that the same media outlets only recently pronounced Qaddafi downright corrigible.
And why not? After all, that was how the State Department saw it. As if history had never really happened, we agreed to let the strongman receive an ebullient Secretary Rice (“my darling black African woman,” as Qaddafi called her) in the very Bab al-Azizia compound that President Reagan had ordered bombed in retaliation for Libya’s 1986 terrorist attack on a Berlin disco. Qaddafi had targeted American servicemen and managed to kill two of them while maiming hundreds of other victims....
In any event, guess who else wants Qaddafi gone tomorrow? None other than Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s sharia compass, who is still tingling from his recent, triumphant return to Egypt, right across the border from Eastern Libya, where Qaddafi’s fiercest opposition just happens to be. He did make time, though, to issue a fatwa last week calling for the Libyan despot’s assassination.
Not to worry, though. We have it on good authority (the U.S. government) that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” organization, with a real passion for democracy. Perhaps if one of the Libyan secularists is moved to carry out the fatwa — which, of course, should be understood as a strictly secular edict — Secretary Clinton could find a new friend of America in Sheikh Qaradawi. They say Bab al-Azizia is lovely this time of year.
Read entire article at National Review
...Yes, yes, I know: We are not supposed to look at Libyans now as they appeared the last time we took notice: a cheering throng greeting Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie terrorist, whom the Obama administration was cajoled into ignoring when the Brits orchestrated his release from jail to appease our spot-shorn leopard. Nor are we supposed to register that Qaddafi’s main opponents in this 97 percent Muslim country are Islamists who have about as much use for us as they do for Colonel Crazy. No, this is to be the desperately wished-for Arab awakening, so we are to take the Libyans as noble secularists who just want to throw off the yoke of tyranny and establish democracy (and never you mind the sharia).
Eager to get with the program, newspapers, blogs, and television reports tell us that Qaddafi has been America’s incorrigible enemy for 30 years. The problem is, if your memory actually goes back more than ten minutes, you may recall that the same media outlets only recently pronounced Qaddafi downright corrigible.
And why not? After all, that was how the State Department saw it. As if history had never really happened, we agreed to let the strongman receive an ebullient Secretary Rice (“my darling black African woman,” as Qaddafi called her) in the very Bab al-Azizia compound that President Reagan had ordered bombed in retaliation for Libya’s 1986 terrorist attack on a Berlin disco. Qaddafi had targeted American servicemen and managed to kill two of them while maiming hundreds of other victims....
In any event, guess who else wants Qaddafi gone tomorrow? None other than Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s sharia compass, who is still tingling from his recent, triumphant return to Egypt, right across the border from Eastern Libya, where Qaddafi’s fiercest opposition just happens to be. He did make time, though, to issue a fatwa last week calling for the Libyan despot’s assassination.
Not to worry, though. We have it on good authority (the U.S. government) that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” organization, with a real passion for democracy. Perhaps if one of the Libyan secularists is moved to carry out the fatwa — which, of course, should be understood as a strictly secular edict — Secretary Clinton could find a new friend of America in Sheikh Qaradawi. They say Bab al-Azizia is lovely this time of year.